The Form and the Spirit 285interpretation of Fate or self-acting Karma or of the simple or
complex natural entanglements of the human life-movement,
but a revelation of the Soul as its own fate and determiner
of its life and its karma and behind it of the powers and the
movements of the spirit in the universe. It will not be limited by
any lesser idealisms or realisms, but representing at will this and
other worlds, the purpose of the gods and the actions of men,
man’s dreams and man’s actualities each as real as the other, the
struggles and the sufferings and the victories of the spirit, the
fixities of Nature and her mutabilities and significant perversions
and fruitful conversions, interpret in dramatic form the inmost
truth of the action of man the infinite. It will not be limited
either by any old or new formal convention, but transmute old
moulds and invent others and arrange according to the truth of
its vision its acts and the evolution of its dramatic process or the
refrain of its lyrical or the march of its epic motive. This clue at
least is the largest and the most suggestive for a new and living
future creation in the forms of the drama.
The spirit and intention of the narrative and epic forms of
poetry must undergo the same transmuting change. Hitherto the
poetical narrative has been a simple relation or a vivid picturing
or transcript of life and action varied by description of sur-
rounding circumstance and indication of mood and feeling and
character or else that with the development of an idea or a mental
and moral significance at the basis with the story as its occasion
or form of its presentation. The change to a profounder motive
will substitute a soul significance as the real substance, the action
will not be there for its external surface interest but as a vital
indication of the significance, the surrounding circumstance will
be only such as helps to point and frame it and bring out its
accessory suggestions and mood and feeling and character its
internal powers and phases. An intensive narrative, intensive in
simplicity or in richness of significant shades, tones and colours,
will be the more profound and subtle art of this kind in the
future and its appropriate structures determined by the needs
of this inner art motive. A first form of the intensive and spiri-
tually significant poetic narrative has already been created and